Measuring the World
by Guardian54
Summary: Because the next time I see someone claim the Elemental Nations are 60 light-seconds across I'm going to ask him to implode into a black hole like he wants to happen to Naruto. This is a detailed analysis of the Naruto World in astrophysics, physiology, geography, engineering, etc. Feel free to laugh at others' utter ignorance of all logic in their analyses.
1. Lift Your Hands to the Sky

**A/N:** I tried to look up the distance from Suna to Konoha on google… and it was pathetic (someone said their lowball estimate was over 70,000 kilometers). This is a detailed study that justifies my decisions and such in "Hinata Supreme" (e.g. Free Running on native terrain is about 40 km/h, sprinting is faster and Body Flicker faster still) and all other Naruto fics I might write.

"The new sciences have given us a number of different ways to describe and measure the world around us. Let us send these learned men out into the world in general and into our country in particular. We cannot know what resources are at our disposal until we have thoroughly searched all our lands for minerals, counted every last subject and assessed every last enterprise." –Europa Universalis IV, Admin Tech 23, "Measuring the World"-

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Chapter 1: Lift Your Hands to the Sky

 _The fight is done, the war is won,  
raise your hands toward the sun…_

Star systems… the basic unit of galactic civilization… tend to be rather predictable affairs. The Naruto World is no exception.

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On October 10, the Nine-Tails attacked Konoha.

Twelve-year-olds are not considered physically mature enough to be breeding, and are of similar physical size and maturity to Earth 12-year-olds. We assume that Naruto World humans develop comparably to Earth humans.

These two facts immediately tell us several things. First of all, the calendar of the planet is at least very similar to the Earth calendar, as seen by the organisms' development cycles and the fact that they have, apparently, a 12-month year.

To claim then that the planet itself is similar to Earth (complete with a large moon) is too far for now. So let's hold off on that for now.

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The star the Naruto World orbits is a yellow to white star. This means that the habitable zone for Earth-standard life (which the Naruto World has) is comparable to that around Sol. Within this habitable zone, the planet will have an orbital period most likely between 300 and 400 Earth days. It also has a large moon.

Less euphemistically, it is an Earth analogue in terms of year length, general climate, etc.

Now let's move on to the size of the planet, its galactic locale, and the feasibility of certain planet sizes.

We automatically eliminate ludicrous claims such as Ei (because Word spell-check HATES a single capital A for grammar, at least adding that to dictionary makes it shut up) taking 60 seconds at light speed to reach Madara. The Sun is about 4.65 light-seconds across, so the Naruto World would need to be nearly flat (because the Elemental Nations map is flat and we don't see any globes in the series that I'm aware of, so they haven't figured out that the numbers for distances just don't add up to a flat world) across a length 12 times the diameter of the Sun. That is so large and massive that at terrestrial densities, it would probably collapse into a neutron star or even, thereafter, a black hole.

The fact that the Nine-Tails attack on Konoha scene in the anime has no stars visible due to the burning village shows us that the Naruto World is not within a galactic core region, or stars should be visible still due to the density of white-blue sub-giant to blue supergiants in the area. By the way, due to frequent supernovae galactic cores are not conducive to development of Earth-like planets due to atmospheric stripping and irradiation of surface life that made a breathable atmosphere by frequent supernovae. Thus the planet would have had to be terraformed by back-to-nature nuts from an advanced human civilization if it was in a galactic core region.

By stellar development, yellow, yellow-white or white stars should not have enough dust in the inner system to form a mostly rocky planet much larger than about three or four Earth diameters at absolute max. There is no particular reason to believe this is the case either, given the architecture we see is stuff that would work on Earth, instead of having to stand up to three times the gravity.

If the Naruto World was as large as assuming ninja can do Free Running in their native terrain at anything above something like 40 km/h, the distance from Suna to Konoha, coverable in 60 hours with minimal rest, would make the planet large enough (to avoid realizing distances didn't match up to a flat world) that it would have kept a thicker atmosphere. That way, with its orbital period and associated distance, it would easily have been a Venus-like Hell World, or been big enough to have attracted enough gas early in stellar formation to be a hot, close gas giant.

Therefore, the Naruto world should be an Earth analogue, and the Elemental Nations are, at absolute most, spanning a continent around the size of Europe, from Iberia and Iceland to Scandinavia and Anatolia. This is AT MOST, just based on climate, star colour, etc. for a very simple, quick analysis!

Details on further size restrictions (which usually make things smaller) will come in the next chapter of this dissection of how utterly insane most of the distance estimates for the Naruto World are.

Anyone who complains that while Naruto obviously has a somewhat industrialized world from food packaging and such but lack cars because Ninja abilities replace them should remember just how goddamned slow early cars and trains were (much slower than people, or at least horses, can sprint). Evolution of culture and technology also doesn't move from one fitness "peak" to another… in other words the Ninja world cornered itself into a dead end by relying on chakra too much.

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 **A/N:** Because anyone too stupid to realize ninja could not yell at each other effectively if they were moving more than a few dozen meters per second through the air that conducts their chatter needs to read this.

 **Please Comment by Review!**


	2. Running Down a Spiral

A/N: Glad Chapter 1 was well received in terms of basic astrophysics.

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Chapter 2: Running Down a Spiral

 _With the light of better men.  
Shouting progress is survival,  
they're coming after me!_

 _NOW! Life is not the same!  
I am one, but sparks turn into flames!_

 _Will you take what's in my head,  
erase me when I'm dead  
'cause the future is here,  
and now I'm disappearing…_

Tazuna walks at a civilian pace. This means about 1.5 meters per second sustained, 5.4 km/h, for 12 hours a day.

It is commonly agreed that it took Team 7 and Tazuna between one and two weeks to walk to the coast near Wave (anything shorter would be insane given the map Kakashi showed of the Elemental Nations and civilian walking speed versus Konoha's distance to any coast of Fire Country). Even accounting for some problems associated with the bridge length relative to the Fire-Wave gap in canon, that's at most about 900 kilometers from Konoha to the coast. It is more likely to be about 10 days, or 650 km walking. That's 600 km straight line, even assuming Wave used to be a trade hub that was used by Fire Country merchants a lot and thus there was a nearly straight road from Konoha to the coast near Wave.

Go look at the chapter where Tazuna talks about Gato, in the manga, and the shape of the island grid that makes up Wave (Chapter 11, Page 8). Then look at the Naruto world map. Wave is that island off the east coast of Fire Country. The distance from Konoha to the coast on the map can at absolute most be stated to be 800 kilometers straight line, and that's being super-generous. In fact it should be much shorter if the bridge and crossing are to be feasible, as shown in the next chapter.

Look at that distance of 800 km on the Naruto map, and see the island shape. By the way, that island is basically universally agreed to be where Uzu used to be, so before Uzu fell, it was Whirlpool Country.

The only excuse for the distance between the coasts on the map is that the extensive mangrove marshes, lagoons, and swamps that make most of the area between it and Fire Country great for chokepoints and kill zones are not solid land enough to be shown readily between it and Fire Country. It is due to these marshes and the harsh, rocky terrain of the southeast coast of Fire Country, and the currents in the bay south of Wave, that Wave and before that Whirlpool were important year-round deep-water shipping ports for much of eastern Fire country. There is no other plausible reason for Wave being a trade nation given its position should easily be occluded by Fire and Water. Why you might think Wave is in the southwest coast (Narutopedia map screw-up) is beyond me since Fire Country has a large bay there that it could have its own shipping ports in in the south, with no islands or any sign that it's potentially got a lot of shallow, impassable water or cliffs. To say that the southern coast on the ridge past that bay has cliffs is believable, to say the bay has steep cliffs is not, because it is hardly Bay of Fundy scale funnelling of tides. Even if it was, closer to the mouth of the bay there would be good harbour sites, such as a certain city in New Brunswick that got neglected for Halifax post-Confederation when it came to developing Canada's premier deep-water harbour.

This particular part is rehashed in the next chapter because it is necessary for the bridge/boat analysis.

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 **Free Running Speed**

If the distance to the coast near Wave is 800km on the map, then the distance from Konoha to Suna is about 1100 km by that scale. When Free Running at an average of 30 kilometers per hour (slower on sand, and there are breaks that must be taken for food and water, on optimal terrain it's about 40 KPH at best), 60 hours to get there from Konoha is a potential 1800 kilometers. This is reasonable given detours, and given how sand should be MUCH slower than tree-hopping, which to be honest should be actually equal or slower than running along the ground… 30 KPH might be an overestimate as an average.

Given the fact that from their lifespans and Hiruzen actually looking old at only 69 years of age, clearly the locals haven't been genetically modified to live hundreds of years. (Perhaps the Uzumaki clan began by breeding with "aliens" i.e. more advanced humans going to a back-to-nature nut world as tourists?) Therefore, it's not unreasonable to say that they aren't augmented TOO far above baseline humans in anything except chakra. To say that ninjas continually use LARGE amounts of chakra for muscle enhancement while Free Running through their native terrain would be very bad for the reason of potential encounters and skirmishes. Thus we cannot expect their sustained running speed over long distances to be much better than a baseline human athlete's sprinting speed, or about 40 kilometers per hour, despite passive chakra boosting.

Given how effective human legs are at long distance running—our earliest hunting strategy, Persistence Hunting, literally consisted of "stubborn anything that runs instead of standing and fighting to exhaustion, then kill it"—you might want to know that baseline human endurance running is only 6.5 meters per second by elite runners. This is after hundreds of thousands of generations of selection for a hot-day meat scavenger and later chaser, outracing hyenas to lion kills circled by vultures at first. Later we changed to running antelopes and gazelle down until they could move no more from heat exhaustion before stabbing them with sharp sticks or pelting them to death with stones, when stones were available. Human history is literally a history of sticks and stones…

It is stupidly generous to say that tree hopping or running over sand with minimal technique use can maintain 11 meters per second. Yet I did it to make ninjas seem as superhuman and strong as reasonably possible. Sprinting is faster, particularly with chakra reinforcement, and the Body Flicker faster still.

Oh, and another problem with Free Running… Chapter 9 Page 4 shows the three of them taking a frame to cover 5 meters of distance. To catch a cat in half second by surprise is physically doable. One second is about the longest time possible for that task before the cat accelerates too much and uses its agility too much. Therefore, to have the kids' sprint be about baseline human in sprint start-up would be sufficient to catch it in something like 0.6 seconds. So the scene showing them all hiding away as blurs during Kakashi's test is in significant part artistic dramatization (also on 24 frames per second, to cover more than about 10-20 centimeters can already blur your bodily features beyond recognition, so that only requires 2.4-4.8 m/s really), while the catching Tora event is more realistic speed.

Let's look closer at **tree-hopping** SPECIFICALLY.

The human leg is incredible at storing elastic energy and releasing it while adding more energy. Tree-hopping has longer timeframes between additions of energy, and should be more or less comparable at retaining energy. The air resistance remains comparable. Thus it should actually be EQUAL OR SLOWER than running along the ground. Free Running just means using whatever is possible to help, such as swinging off tree branches to use one's arms to help move faster. 40 km/h remains ludicrously generous by that metric and the sheer physics involved, and basically forces chakra boosting to be used to sustain that speed.

Assuming sprinting is about double this speed (as is true for baseline humans' endurance run versus sprint) we get the hilarious result of two ninjas running toward each other each sound like they have about 13% higher frequency in their yelling (running off of the speed of sound being 340 m/s versus a total closing speed of 44 m/s). Thus Gai and Lee running at each other while shouting would sound much higher-pitched than normal. The Body Flicker would be far worse in terms of trying to hear someone yelling something.

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No matter what, the **Body Flicker does not approach Mach 1. It does not even surpass 100 m/s at absolute maximum.**

If it did, we would see a noticeable shockwave build up ahead of someone using it. The most I can possibly think of a Body Flicker being is crossing two hundred meters in one second, or 720 km/h. That doesn't account for how bad it would be for your eyes if so much as a gnat got in the way, not to mention dust, flies, etc. In fact, 360 km/h seems much more feasible, and even that would require a chakra shield in front of the user. Otherwise flinging a chicken or something into their path would be lethal as living (and very deceased after impact) chickens can punch easily through car windshields at such speeds. The amount of chakra enhancement needed for the eye to see things in its path would make knowing the Body Flicker more than good enough to substitute for the Sharingan when using Chidori too.

Kakashi was standing 4 meters away from Naruto in Chapter 4 Page 15, To cross that distance in 1/10 of a second, half the time it takes to blink, is more than enough that the two noobs distracted by Naruto don't even see Kakashi move, while Naruto barely sees him. That's only 40 m/s. I'll be generous, and say that at 20 FPS (early movies were only 18 FPS, later it was raised to 24) he took one frame's time to move, so 80 m/s maybe, and he took a very mild detour to orient correctly?

Do you know how much air pressure builds up ahead of a human-shaped object ramming through the air at 80 meters per second? If he was moving that fast with the Body Flicker, Kakashi didn't just grab Naruto to stop him from moving, he stopped Naruto's arm from being blown off-course and stabbing his own head with his kunai.

So MAYBE we can put Body Flicker down as 80 meters per second, so 288 kilometers per hour. (By the way, for Hinata Supreme readers, that's Tier 1 Light Assault Bot and Tier 3 Siege Assault Bot speed, no land unit is faster, but a SAB can keep running pretty much forever at that speed.) **There is a severe problem with this.** If you can move at 80 m/s and see where you are going while evading obstacles, which is why the Body Flicker doesn't tend to impale the user on swaying tree branches, then the same technique that shields and boosts your eyes ought to be able to **easily do the Chidori without the Sharingan at ninja combat ranges (consider how long Sasuke took to reach Itachi with his Chidori active, before Sasuke's defection). We know this to be FALSE.**

So Body Flicker is much less than 80 m/s, probably 40-50 at best.

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 **Mobility CONCLUSIONS:**

Therefore, I can only estimate the **Body Flicker as around 40-50 meters per second (144-180 KPH), sprinting under good conditions as about 20 meters per second (72 KPH), and Free Running at about 11 m/s (40 KPH) on native, relatively solid terrain** (e.g. you are used to it). Sand dunes make it slower, verily.

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 **A/N:** Review Replies!

 **SEAL-TEAM6** : Thanks.

 **Anime and Game Fan** : Please enjoy how tree-hopping should really be slower than ground-based Free Running.

 **Ketsui Meraki** : They do not figure out that the world is round in Naruto, or at least we see no globes which model the world as round, only flat maps. Also, the Elemental Nations, as proven here, CANNOT be all that big. I'm stating that if the Elemental Nations are too big, they'd figure out the world was round just by the math of distances between locations not adding up correctly.

 **Please Comment by Review!**


	3. Nice Boats

A/N: We're about to study boats, bridge architecture, strategic considerations, etc.

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Chapter 3: Nice Boats

 _Yes, that meme…_

The boat shown crossing to Wave in the manga (which is considered more canon than the anime) is most likely a Punt of some description (though it has a pointed bow), propelled by a pole the user pushes along the bottom of the body of water. A punter who is trying to be stealthy, as per canon, would most likely be moving at an average swimmer's sprint pace or slower (this is a gross overestimate of punt speed) to reduce the sound signature, so something on the order of 1.5 meters per second (5.4 km/h) at absolute maximum, most likely closer to 1 meter per second (still probably an overestimate based on videos I've found of punting). The sloshing sound of the pole through the water can carry far in quiet conditions. Thus the bridge has an upper limit of absolutely no more than 2.7 kilometers, because. I doubt a coward like Kaji would put up with a trip of more than about half an hour even in a heavy fog (and anything longer is dangerous in a fog for risk of getting lost, even if he's so familiar with the crossing that he knows by contact of his punt where he more or less is. We know the dialogue on the trip isn't that long.

We also know that the remaining gap to the mainland is not very big. It took two weeks from Zabuza and Haku's death to Team 7 leaving Wave for them to close a gap of about 10-20 meters, as seen in the confrontation of villagers and mercenaries in the manga. Granted they might have had to build customs stations and a pit stop on the Fire Country shore, but the bridge was only a week and a bit from being finished. We also know there are no cars in Naruto, despite internal combustion engines existing (e.g. Kaji's boat), so there is no heavy construction equipment either. Building a 2.7 kilometer bridge of that width, without heavy modern lift equipment, is INSANE.

This shaves down the possible length of the Great Naruto Bridge to under 2 kilometers.

The bridge is about 8-10 meters wide in the manga when Team 7 is leaving, with arches underneath that are absolutely no longer than about twice the bridge width. The image shown for the bridge on Narutopedia shows at most about half a kilometer's worth of bridge sticking out from one coast (not showing the other end) considering that aspect ratio (eyeballed) and the number of arches shown. Hiring an A or S-rank mission from Konoha to kill Gato should really have cost less than getting enough stone to build that bridge in a mostly marshy country like Wave, unless they had some mountains somewhere… which they should because Uzu was on that island according to most map-drawing folks analyzing Naruto. The image for the destroyed Uzu on Narutopedia had something from decent-sized hills to minor mountains in the background.

Look at the world map and the island Uzu is usually labelled as, and then at the map of Wave shown when Tazuna was talking about Gato during their crossing to Wave. It is obvious that Whirlpool is agreed to now be Wave after Uzu fell.

However, the Fire Country coast is ludicrously far away from Wave on the map if that's the case. The best I can come up with is that they represent the solid coast of a plateau, and not the massive swampland, lagoons, etc. that extend out toward Wave like a barely-above-water version of a continental shelf. The few fingers of solid land that once connected Fire Country and Whirlpool, being great chokepoints, were then destroyed during the Siege and subsequent destruction of Uzu.

This is the only possible way to explain away the hideously bad map, without taking a whole damned day punting from Fire to Wave. That would be at absolute most about 130 kilometers if Kaji could keep up 1.5m/s for a whole damned day. That whole day of punting would be necessary to make Fire Country, by the map scale, reasonable in size for Naruto and Jiraiya to take over a week (at absolute least, I seem to remember canon being several weeks) looking for Tsunade in bars and casinos in the country at ninja speeds. The sustained running speed was discussed previously to be roughly comparable to a car on a highway, and they were walking, not running, so they should be moving at no more than 6 km/h from Konoha to the town they found Tsunade in. That town is marked on at least one map that I can remember as being roughly halfway between Konoha—in the CENTER of Fire Country—and the border with Earth! To take weeks for that suggests Fire is not a small country.

If we take that distance to be the actual distance involved, or Tazuna's walk to the coast for reference (calculated in chapter 2), it would be completely impossible for a ANYONE (forget the supposed cowardice of Kaji) to be okay with punting them across that space on the map from Fire to Wave. It would take him weeks to cross those hundreds of kilometers of water!

If that boat was rowed by a single oar over the stern (possible, as the pole looked a bit too wide in the manga to be a punt… or even a pole for that matter), it should be even slower than a punt, so the distance should be even smaller.

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 **The Great Naruto Bridge**

Due to simple limitations by construction equipment and technology (we have no evidence that reinforcement seals are commonly used in civilian construction), the bridge can be no more than 2km or so, most likely about 1 km.

Why did Gato let it almost get completed? He was certain that the bridge would be unaffordable for the people of Wave, and it was just a playing ground of his, a big power trip. Watching them try and try and then crush themselves under the costs of trying is a lot of fun for power tripping types. It was only when it was almost done that he had to act. If it was finished, the Fire Daimyo would never allow him to keep his control over Wave, even blowing up the bridge when it was nearly done would be too damned obvious and against the Fire Nation's strategic interests, it would draw the Fire Daimyo's ire and the whole strength of Konoha down on him.

Since Wave was supposedly an old shipping hub, a rival for Water, then it must have handled lots of traffic for the east coast of Fire. That shoreline then must be particularly treacherous, so the Fire Daimyo has a vested interest in Wave. He didn't invade Wave back when it was Whirlpool because of the choke-points, and he didn't take it over after Uzu fell because the ground army was more important, due to Fire being surrounded by enemies on land, so he didn't have the navy budget for a conquest of Uzu. After the Second Ninja War when Uzu fell, perhaps there were treaties that he thought too expensive to violate, due to how drained Konoha, the Fire Samurai, and probably the Fire Monks were. The Daimyos must be able to keep power somehow instead of losing it to the ninjas… so they need Samurai and Warrior Monks, for three military groups that can keep each other under control.

This should be an adequate explanation of why Wave could be a shipping hub given its position (which is far inferior to Water as a potential shipping hub just by looking at the coastlines) being almost enveloped by Fire and Lightning.

So the only choice Gato had once the bridge was almost done was to kill Tazuna and leave the bridge unfinished. The Fire Nation interfering with Wave's internal affairs (killing Tazuna), as opposed to a completed connection between the two, would be bad for its reputation among the smaller nations between the Big Five, who stay neutral because they are forced to as buffer nations, unless they want to become battlegrounds again for another Ninja War.

In conclusion, the Great Naruto Bridge is certainly under 2 kilometers long, most likely somewhere around 1 kilometer. The map between Fire and Wave grossly exaggerates the amount of open water between them.

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 **A/N:** Review Replies!

 **BH18** : thanks!

 **Guest** : How many times do I have to say that SI Archives will be republished eventually as original fiction (the first bits, in a relatively early iteration, are already up over at FictionPress), and that Supreme Commander: Mass Effect (the original version was an immensely long embarrassment once I improved my writing skills) is making a comeback starting with "Supreme Commander: Evangelion", "Hinata Supreme", "The Furling Legacy", and of course my Codex (to help me keep track of things) to set the balls rolling?

 **Please comment by review!**


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